Tips for Easily Creating Websites

About 80% of the people who go about creating a blog do not really know how to optimize it for search engines and are therefore losing much of the traffic they could otherwise get.

Succeeding online with your blog can be a very tedious step and it’s in fact the little steps you take that really matter. It’s of great importance to have your blog optimized for the search engines. The latter are the best way to start getting a bit of traffic and as you create more content and get better rankings, the success in fact adds up and more and more people arrive at your website via them.

Most of you who start up with their blogs, have to decide which software to use. Studies have shown that most bloggers today use Wordpress, followed by blogger and LiveJournal. It’s widely accepted that Wordpress is the best blogging system at the time and therefore i’ll be using it as an example of how to set up your search engine optimized blog.

The Need to Get Your Own Host

Wordpress is an absolutely FREE blogging software that has lots of plugins and templates available to make your life easier. You can download it for free at wordpress.com and start setting your blog immediately. As an option, you can host your own site for free at wordpress.com. However, i would STRONGLY advice you against it. If you’re serious about your blog and possibly want to make some money by it, do buy a hosting packet. It costs about 4-5 dollars per month and it’s nothing when compared to the problems that you WILL face sooner or later if you choose free web hosting.

Why Worry For SEO When Wordpress Can Do It or you?

Some Search Engine Optimization experts may understandably argue with that point, but the truth is that for 95% of the cases, Wordpress plugins are more than enough. Therefore, casual Wordpress bloggers just need to be able to set up some important plugins and do not worry further for their seo. If you do what is essential, the search engines will find you and traffic will come for sure.

If you are not that knowledgeable about the topic, you may want to take a look at Search Engine Optimization – Better and Faster Search Engine Placement where the standard seo techniques are thoroughly described.

There are some very powerful plugins to use with wordpress that automate the tasks needed to maintain a healthy relationship with the search engines. Bear in mind that while you may have the best SEO in the world, you will not get traffic unless you have quality content and some time passes. Google loves sites that are not that new and loves content too. However, do not expect to create a blog and have lots of traffic in the first days even though your SEO is great. Give it time, though and it will add up in bringing more people to your site. Let’s see the important plugins that work under the hood for us:

1) All in One SEO Pack

This is really a must have plugin. It allows you to set your page title, description and meta keywords information and rewritten urls type. The first three are in fact the only real configuration you’ll have to make, since it already has everything else configured for you.

2) Google XML Sitemaps

Another must. This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Search engines are VERY pleased when you provide them with your site changes before they have to crawl you. Make your life better to help them do the same for you. Once more you don’t have to set up anything. The only thing you’ll need to do if you want to have yahoo alerted about your changes is to obtain a Yahoo Application ID and paste it to the plugin’s configuration page.

3) HeadMeta

It’s important that you create separate keywords and description for EACH of your posts in your blog. Do not be bored to do so. It’s important to do that every time since it’s vital for your search engine rankings. Using this plugin you can create your custom meta tags and description for each of your posts. When you create a new post, you get these options and you fill them out in the very bottom. Remember to do it !

4) Permalink Redirect

A PageRank important plugin. Since you’re utilizing permalinks(rewritten urls) with the All in One Seo Pack plugin, it would be a very nice idea to automatically redirect the old standard urls to the new ones. This way, your old pages do not retrieve not important ranking and are redirected to the new and important ones for your website, without your needing to configure it at all.

5) Enforce www. Preference

This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs and is also quite important for your general SEO practices. No need to configure anything once more.

6) Canonical URL’s

You would not want to compete with your own URLs in the road to better ranking, do you? Canonical Urls do just that, make it so that every webpage is accessible by a single resource. Just install it and you’re ready to go.
Remember that you should not underestimate the power of Search Engine Optimization at no times. It’s always better to be safe than sorry after all. Have an edge over some of your competitors with properly configuring your website in that area and you’ll certainly be pleased with the results.

Related Posts

• Problogger’s SEO Tips And Real Life Examples For Them
• Search Engine Optimization – Better and Faster Search Engine Placement
• Drupal, Joomla, or other Content Management System?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 5:45 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.